The Far Right

How Many Watergates Is Devin Nunes’s Memo?

Few media events better exemplify America’s political polarization than Devin Nunes’s much-hyped memo on alleged F.B.I. misconduct, which has been described by Democrats as a glorified Facebook post and by Trumpublicans as evidence of a world-historical conspiracy against the president. The arguments against the latter interpretation are almost too numerous to recount: Carter Page, the Trump campaign adviser placed under surveillance by the bureau in 2016, had already been a high-profile intelligence target for years. The FISA warrant for Page, which allegedly cited the Steele dossier, explicitly disclosed its political origins, a fact that Nunes initially declined to mention. The same F.B.I. that supposedly conspired with Hillary Clinton to overturn the results of the election also torpedoed Clinton’s campaign by publicly reopening her e-mail server case while declining to make public that it was also investigating the Trump campaign for collusion with Russia. If this was a coup attempt, it was the most boneheaded, incompetent, and confused conspiracy in history.

When Nunes finally released his four-page memo on Friday, the mania surrounding the document disappeared everywhere except the fever swamps of the far right, where the only debate was over the exact size and scope of the horror. “This political scandal is almost identical to Watergate in multiple respects, and it’s 10 times bigger,” Trump “voter fraud” czar Kris Kobach told Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM. Iowa Rep. Steve King initially described it, somewhat metaphysically, as “deeper than Watergate”; after its release, he called it “a component of what looks like a much larger conspiracy involving the #Obama DOJ & FBI & more.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity, who had predicted that the memo would make “Watergate [look like] stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore,” later said it was “Watergate times a thousand,” and demanded that the Robert Mueller probe be disbanded immediately. “The F.B.I. misled and purposefully deceived a federal court while using an unverified, completely phony opposition research bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton to spy on an opposition campaign during a presidential election!” said Hannity. “Now that type of abusive power, that type of corruption, that shredding of the Constitution—it is unprecedented in American history.” (Fox News host Chris Wallace, for his part, sagely suggested that it was neither “worse than Watergate” nor “nothing, as some have said.”)

For others, the Watergate scandal was an insufficient metric for the atrocity Nunes had unearthed. “It has to be put in the context of the history of our great nation,” former White House staffer Sebastian Gorka, who is wanted on gun charges in Hungary, told Hannity, shortly before the memo was released. “Remember, why was America created? It was created because of the use of power by a leader thousands of miles away,” he explained, outlining the grievances that led to the American Revolution. “This is 100 times bigger.” He was still fuming days later, having examined the contents of the memo. This was a “propagandized information operation,” Gorka argued on C-SPAN over the weekend, led by individuals “desperate” to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. “That is all you need to know about the veracity of the dossier.”

As to how the Clinton-Obama-Comey-McCabe-Lynch conspirators ought to be dealt with, there was likewise a broad spectrum of opinion. Hannity suggested that Justice Department officials should be indicted, and that former F.B.I. director James Comeyshould be in jail. If Watergate resulted in prison sentences, after all, shouldn’t the perpetrators of Watergate 10X, or Watergate 1,000X, face proportionate punishment? Rep. Paul Gosar, for one, called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek “criminal prosecution against these traitors to our nation,” arguing that their actions “constitute treason”—a crime, in case anyone had forgotten, that is punishable by death.